The Center for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and the Environment, led by the University of California, San Diego, on Monday announced the National Science Foundation grant on Monday. While aerosols are best known as the contents of spray cans, they also include dust, soot, pollution and sea spray, said Kimberly Prather, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry at UC San Diego and director of the center.

“They’re very visual,” she said. “You can see their evidence in red sunsets, tailpipes, and gobs of them coming from wildfires. The natural ones are from the ocean.”

Those are the ones the center will start with, she said. While human-caused particulate pollution is easily visible, natural aerosols released by the ocean are more abundant, and have a more profound effect on the environment.

Although conventional wisdom and some climate models presume sea spray to be vaporized salt, Prather said it’s a baffling brew of lipids, proteins, and even live viruses and bacteria.

But without baseline data on what those are and how they interact in the atmosphere, scientists are at loss to analyze their effects.

“We understand the man-made chemicals a lot more than we understand what was on the planet before Adam and Eve landed here,” said Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a Scripps atmospheric and climate scientist, who has studied the effects of particulate pollution on climate change.

In 2010 Prather received a preliminary $1.5 million grant to develop the program for study of aerosols. While the upper atmosphere contains “tens of chemicals” Prather said, the lower atmosphere comprises tens of thousands, making it trickier to analyze their interactions. Moreover, constantly shifting ocean conditions have confounded efforts to analyze the composition of sea spray on the water.

“We’ve tried for many decades to study the ocean,” she said, travelling to remote stretches of the Indian Ocean. “We couldn’t unravel the complexity of freshly created aerosols.”

So instead, Prather and colleagues refined a technique for simulating sea spray in the lab. Piping in sea water from the Scripps Pier, they infuse it with microorganisms and blast it with wave breaks, which she said are essential to reproducing the exact surface structure of real sea spray.

The surface structure of aerosol particles is key, a foreign terrain that distorts the rules of physics and chemistry, scientists said.

“The trick is that the things are small, and all the rules for what happens on the surface don’t apply,” said Mark Thiemens, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD.

So while the research conducted at the center will have immediate implications for climate study, meteorology and environmental policy, its efforts to decipher the rules of particle chemistry could break new ground in basic science, said Mario Molina, 1995 Nobel laureate in chemistry and one of the researchers at the center.

“It’s applied science because it deals with social problems, and also fundamental science,” he said.

The center will study how air-born particles seed clouds and redistribute rainfall, Prather said. It will examine how they contribute to atmospheric warming in some cases, but mediate the effects of greenhouse gases in others. And it will consider how air-borne pathogens affect contribute to health risks such as respiratory illnesses and Kawasaki disease, a childhood auto-immune condition.

“We want to be in the business of exploring the unexplored,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla. “This is what I think of as big research with a very big impact.”